If D&I isn’t one of your company’s OKRs with regards to hiring practices, I would recommend you to include this ASAP. Diversity is not only a proven business case, but it’s also something that many governments will enforce on companies in the coming years. For example, here in the Netherlands, the government is working on a new law that requires companies with more than 10 employees to have a working method in place, aimed at creating equal opportunities in the recruitment and selection process and the supervision thereof.
Job assessments have the potential to be a great method to ensure equal opportunities and to improve diversity – however, not in the way most companies are currently using it. Or to be more precisely, not in the position within the hiring funnel where assessments are often introduced. In this blog I will explain to you why, as well as how to translate your assessments into a diversity-booster, by changing its position in your hiring funnel.
When and how most companies make use of job assessments
When and how
Assessments are most often introduced between the phone screening and first interview. After the recruiter or hiring manager has completed a first screening or even the first interview, the assessment will be sent out to a candidate in order to validate the assumptions that were made during this screening – is this candidate really a good fit from both a job- and culture-perspective?
Impact
By introducing assessments after a first screening, meant to validate the assumptions that were made during this screening, the assessment only helps you make the right choice from the talent pool that remains after the screening.
And although this is an open door, I would like to emphasise this one more time: Human-based screening is extremely biased. While trying to base our opinion solely on relevant information, we can’t prevent our human bias to influence this opinion. Also, we have very limited information about a candidate, when working with resumes and motivation letters, as this doesn’t reveal any objective insights in someone’s personality and skills. And as a result of that, we fill up the blank spots by making use of our gut feeling. So how to debias hiring and stimulate a diverse talent pool, if you form this candidate pool yourself, based on your own biases?
When and how companies should make use of job assessments
When and how
The only way you can ensure equal opportunities in hiring, is by introducing assessments at the start of your hiring funnel. Here’s why.
As I mentioned above, when initially screening candidates, there are lots of blank spots. After all, a resume or motivation letter might provide you with a first impression, but it doesn’t objectively reveal someone’s skills, potential and fit with your culture. And ironically enough, those are exactly the insights you need to properly assess a candidate’s fit with the job and the company.
All those blank spots trigger your gut feeling and unconscious biases, resulting in biased hiring decisions. So if you want to create an equal playing field, you should remove the blank spots at the start of your hiring funnel. And that can be done with assessments.
Impact
By introducing assessments at the start of the hiring funnel, meant to help you create a solid first impression of a candidate, the assessment helps you base your hiring decisions on insights that actually determine someone’s success within your company – without getting distracted by insights such as demographic details, which are in no way predictive for hiring success. Moreover, every candidate provides you with the exact same insights to base your decisions on.
And that enables an equal playing field, leading to more diversity.
How Equalture can help
Equalture integrates with your career site and Applicant Tracking System, in order to take over the application procedure. By letting your candidates apply through Equalture, they will complete our neuroscientific games right away. As soon as the candidates finishes their application, you will receive a complete, data-backed profile from a candidate, providing you with not only previous experiences and educational background, but also the candidate’s assessment results.
And as I believe we should be the leading example here, since we’re building a software to debias hiring, I am extremely proud to share the following statistics with you about our very own Equalture Crew:
- Exactly 50% of our team is female, and when looking at the Engineering/Product team, 43% is female.
- We are today with 16 people, representing 7 different nationalities.
Ready to actually start creating an equal playing field for your candidates? We are more than happy to show you how Equalture could help you with that.
Cheers, Charlotte
